A study found that people who were exposed to emotional images reacted according to the reactions of others and judged harshly those who did not react like everyone else
What is an emotion? What is its importance and role in the human experience? How does it affect us and what motivates us to try to change it, in ourselves or in others? "Emotions can be regulated and manipulated, like any mental skill. They can be used and routed in a way that benefits us or the environment. For example, if I got into a situation where if I'm too nice they won't listen to me, I can channel anger into action (for example speaking firmly)", explains Prof. Maya Tamir, researcher of emotion and emotional regulation from the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University.
What is the question?
How does exposure to others' emotions shape social judgment?
Prof. Tamir's research deals with the way people relate to their feelings and the feelings of others and try to influence them. Some are done on healthy people and some on people suffering from mental disorders (clinical depression for example). Clinical interventions for emotional regulation can sometimes be developed based on them (for example reducing sadness and negative emotions in depression). According to Prof. Tamir, "We examine what motivates people to try to influence their own or others' emotions. There are quite a few situations where people examine the emotion at the moment of truth and it is interesting to find out how they choose to navigate it, how they know what is right or wrong to feel. There are a variety of emotional strategies (such as hiding the emotion from the environment) that change according to the cultural background. There are those whose influence is similar in different societies, and there are those that in some societies are linked to mental well-being and in other societies - to distress."
In their latest research, which won a grant from the National Science Foundation, Prof. Tamir and her team wanted to check if and how people are affected by the emotions of others, that is, they learn an emotional standard - what is right or wrong to feel - in a certain context. According to her, "It is known that the feelings of others affect us and that we tend to imitate them. For example, if someone smiles at us - we will immediately smile back, and if someone around us is in a good mood - we will probably be infected by it (emotional contagion). We also infer from the feelings of others the value or meaning of things happening around us. For example, a toddler or a child who sees his mother with a scared expression, will understand that there is something to be afraid of."
To answer their research question, the researchers developed a task in which they exposed hundreds of subjects (mainly students) to the emotional reactions of others; They showed them pictures that evoke a negative or positive emotion (for example of a war, an accident, a scary animal, a natural disaster, laughing babies and children playing in a pool). They were then shown how other people rated the intensity of the emotion the image evoked in them on a scale of 100-0 (how positive or negative the image is). Some subjects were exposed to more extreme ratings. In the next step, the subjects were asked to rate the intensity of the emotion that the pictures evoke in them.
It was found that subjects who were exposed to the extreme ratings of others reacted in a similar way (that is, they were "infected" and their emotional response was more extreme). Furthermore, when the same subjects were asked to provide opinions about new subjects, based on their emotional response, they judged them in relation to the average response of the subjects they knew before. For example, if subject A was told that subject B reacted similarly to the other reactions to which A was exposed, then he determined that B is a reliable and competent person. On the other hand, if subject A was told that subject B reacted differently from the other reactions to which A was exposed, he determined that B was less reliable and competent.
It is known that the emotions of others affect us and that we tend to imitate them. For example, if someone smiles at us - we will immediately smile back, and if someone around us is in a good mood - we will probably imitate him.
According to Prof. Tamir, "The subjects received minimal information about others and still sometimes judged them harshly. In the real world, it resembles the light hand on the keyboard. For example, you can sometimes see online that when people are exposed to extreme reactions, they also react in extremes, and often get worse with people who react less extremes. That is, it can be seen that a person's social judgment is influenced by the emotional response of the majority, and that exposure to the emotions of others can affect the attitude to emotion, what is right or wrong to feel. It is known that people learn behavioral norms from others. In our research, we examined whether people also learn from others how to feel, and to what extent this information motivates them to make social judgments that are not directly related to emotion."
Life itself:
Prof. Maya Tamir, 48, married + two daughters (14,16), lives in Moshav near Jerusalem. Even in her free time, she is engaged in her work ("The research questions drip into life and vice versa. The social world was very conspicuous by its absence during the Corona period and conspicuous by its presence in Israel today").
